The main draw for Wednesday night's convention session is vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman and author of a tough budget that remakes the way the government spends money.

Republican convention is in full-throated roar

With the Republican National Convention at last in full-throated roar, nominee Mitt Romney and his team reached out Wednesday to connect with critical voting groups — veterans, Hispanics and women — while gleefully mocking the man he is out to defeat in November.

Romney himself was ducking out of his own convention in Tampa to address the American Legion Convention in Indianapolis. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a top Hispanic voice in the GOP, made the round of morning talk shows to defend the GOP nominee’s policies. And Ann Romney and Janna Ryan, the wife of Romney’s running mate, teamed up to headline a “Women for Romney” fundraiser.

At the women’s event, Mrs. Romney offered her husband as “the one person who is going to turn this country around,” and promised that her husband would keep in mind the needs of women and families, if elected. Later, she attended a Latino Coalition lunch, where son Craig addressed guests in Spanish, and described his father as “a man you can trust.”

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Mrs. Romney told the Latino crowd that Democrats try to make it look like Republicans “don’t care about this community. That’s not true. We very much care about this community.”

Latinos, she said, “are mistaken if they think they are going to be better off” if President Barack Obama wins re-election, she said.

The main draw for Wednesday night’s convention session is vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman and author of a tough budget that remakes the way the government spends money.

“I think people are going to like what they see because we are offering specific, bold solutions to get people back to work, to get this country back on the right track,” Ryan said in a taped interview with WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee. He acknowledged having a stricter anti-abortion stance than Romney, but said he’s comfortable with the GOP nominee’s position “because it’s a vast improvement on the status quo.”

Rubio, interviewed on “CBS This Morning,” held out Ryan as a serious policy thinker who’s “going to have a bunch of new fans across this country” after he speaks.

Obama’s re-election campaign released an online video casting Ryan, who is hugely popular with conservatives, as a politician from a “bygone era” whose budget proposals threaten Medicare and would gut funding for Planned Parenthood.

A poll by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post found Americans deeply divided about Ryan, whom they described as conservative, intelligent, fake, phony.

Romney’s nomination now official, he was free at last to start dipping into his general-election pot of campaign cash.

“We’re excited that now he’s going to be able to spend money, both in English and in Spanish, to explain to people how his policies will help grow the economy, help small business, help people have the confidence to invest in the future,” Rubio said.”

To ensure the cash keeps rolling in, Ann Romney emailed supporters a fundraising appeal that echoed her Tuesday night speech to the convention.

“This man will not fail,” she promised in the plea.

Obama, for his part, was courting another key voting group — young voters — with a second day of campaigning in college towns. He had hoped to speak on the University of Virginia campus, but the school rejected that idea, saying it would disrupt classes on the second day of the semester. He’ll speak in an off-campus pavilion instead.

The politics played out as Hurricane Isaac blew ashore on the Gulf Coast, casting uncertainty into a convention that scrubbed the first day of events out of fear it would swipe Tampa. Officials in Louisiana said that as of midday Wednesday, New Orleans’ flood protection system was holding up as Isaac moved through the area.

The latest economic news suggested weak growth in the second half of the year, fodder for Republicans who blame Obama for the sluggish recovery. The U.S. economy grew at a tepid 1.7 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter, the government reported Wednesday, a bit better than expected due to slightly stronger consumer spending and greater exports.